And our first stop was in Mobile, Alabama.

Actually, that’s not true. Our first stop was at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. A Subway sandwich shop clung to the side of the building and we ate our lunches quickly as a robust family gossiped and laughed at the table next to us. But I digress.

Mobile was cool. It felt a bit more lush, a bit more open, a bit more relaxed than central Alabama, though it was also grittier. You got the feeling Mobile had a romantic soul.

But we kept driving. Into a little, picturesque town called Fairhope, Alabama. Where I literally jumped out of the car at a red light to chase down a Girl Scout selling cookies out of a little red wagon. We walked around the town, which felt like a soundstage for The Stepford Wives, and ate Thin Mints. On our way out of town, we stopped for a few snapshots of dusk on Mobile Bay.

But we kept driving. And the endless fields of grass ended and gave way to this…

And I met the Atlantic Ocean for the very first time!

It was terribly exciting. No, really. Because for one thing, that beach was white and that sand was fine. As in, the opposite of our rocky, driftwood laden beaches. For another thing, there are really neat shells on that beach! Like, the kind you buy at craft stores here. And for a third thing, I love oceans!!

But we kept driving. And we were starving. We let our stomachs guide us into The Sunshine State and right on into Pensacola. I’ve just realized how simple this all sounds, and that needs to be corrected. Because I’ve neglected to mention that this was Mardi Gras weekend.

A Word on Mardi Gras: This may come as a shock to you Pacific Northwesterners or others we will deem Similarly-Uneducated-in-Southern-Tradition but Mardi Gras exists outside of New Orleans. I am not being facetious or attempting to be condescending, I was absolutely shocked. A lot of towns in the South celebrate Mardi Gras, for weeks at a time, with parades multiple times a day (but at least daily). It’s a big deal. It also means we were stuck in hellacious traffic behind a parade as we drove into Pensacola, which explains why we were so absolutely famished by the time we arrived.

So we pretty much stopped at the first place we saw. Which was a good thing, because Jaco’s Bayfront Bar and Grill has crab cake sliders that will change your life. If you are ever in Pensacola, I ask that you please do yourself a favor and dine there. Unfortunately, photographic evidence does not exist of these elusive delicacies because I began my meal with my standard Long Island iced tea (+ empty stomach) and… all my pictures came out blurry. Weird.

My favorite thing about Pensacola itself, however, was a place called Seville Quarter: “Seven rooms of fun, seven nights a week!” I think this is a brilliant concept. You pay one cover and enter a courtyard where seven different bars, for all intents and purposes, are set up. They’re separated very well so everyone can be where they want to be, but they’re also different. There was a hip hop club, more of a honkey tonk, an outdoor country area. It was a very neat place. And it is also where I met up with Brittney who I have known for a very long time. (She had just come from a Mardi Gras masquerade ball – what! Southern Belles get to have way more fun!) Anyway, yeah, woooo, Florida!

The next morning, we drove through a torrential downpour in Mississippi on our way to Louisiana. And I will tell you alllllll about that… next time!

]]> http://alexisjulian.com/2012/05/24/mobile-pensacola-baton-rouge-new-orleans/feed/ 0 alexisjulian mobile gulf pacific ocean http://alexisjulian.com/2012/04/16/nashville-tennessee/ http://alexisjulian.com/2012/04/16/nashville-tennessee/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:20:44 +0000 alexisjulian http://alexisjulian.com/?p=1121 Continue reading →]]> At 4 o’clock, the bars were alive, music was pouring out into the streets, and Nashville had my heart almost instantly. The weather was unfavorable (below freezing with a wind chill), but the sky was blue and the city was beautiful.

We ate dangerously — a huge pasta feast in our Aloft hotel beds from Roma’s Pizza & Pasta, mahi mahi tacos and sinful cookie dough eggrolls at Jackson’s Bar & Bistro were particularly memorable (and delicious) highlights. On the Saturday of our visit, we spent some time on the stunning Vanderbilt campus and followed it up with a trip to the bizarre replica Parthenon.

The Victorian architecture on our first overcast day reminded me so much of Seattle; so did all the musicians, but in Tennessee hipsters strum guitars with a twang. Nashville is an eclectic, vibrant, and sophisticated city. It’s one of those places that feeds off the energy of its inhabitants and becomes charged with that energy. The streets are alive with the music, the buildings swell with sound. And as you walk around Broadway in the heart of downtown, it’s easy to imagine the weight of a guitar strapped to your back. Soaking up the lights and the tunes and the people. Like you came to the Nashville to cash in on your dreams, too.

But then it’s April of three years ago, and April of four. April of last year and April of 2004. And you can’t breathe through it. Not really. You just have to look up at the sky that hangs above you now, where you really are, and settle in to April as it’s happening. Remind yourself that you’re here, the memories will call you back at their will, but to revel in now. Because this night will eventually become the April of two years ago you will inevitably long for.

And I’m back.

This quote is, like, an actual thing people in Alabama say about Mississippi. Of course, I’d never heard it. I didn’t have any preconceived notions about Mississippi because I never really thought about Mississippi. I knew I wanted to go though, because I finished reading The Help about a week before my trip and Jackson is only about three hours from Tuscaloosa.

So we went.

Crossing the state line into Mississippi, Philip and I were both really shocked. I was now aware of the quote above and Philip was always aware of the quote above, so when the pavement dramatically improved the second we were welcomed to Mississippi by a big blue sign we were both impressed. “Wow! Maybe everyone talks shit about Mississippi because they don’t want their state to be the worst.” “Yeah, maybe Mississippi is actually the best of all of them and they keep it a secret!”

It might be because we arrived in Mississippi just as nightfall was creeping into the city, but Mississippi made me sad. I found a very genius app for my phone that mapped out Jackson landmarks from The Help, which Philip and I used to navigate around the city for about an hour. If you’ve read The Help, seen the movie, or have much of an awareness of — and most importantly, interest in — the South through the Civil Rights Era, go to Jackson. To me, Jackson epitomizes the way the South has erased it’s own history. In fact, aside from chain restaurants and cars, it doesn’t seem like all that much has changed in Jackson.

We ate at Whataburger. After I ordered (+milkshake), the boy behind the counter asked if I wanted to add a cherry pie. “No thanks,” I said. He was bewildered, “What about some cookies?” When he was taking out the trash a few minutes later, I noticed that he’d outgrown his pants by at least 2 inches.

At night, Jackson is silent. There aren’t really stores downtown. The large “white” neighborhoods in downtown Jackson still stand, a little worse for wear. Jackson wears the bad economy like an old cast. The bad part of town is literally across the tracks, over a bridge, in fact, and one of the most heartbreaking places I’ve ever seen. Every other street is named after a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement, the Medger Evers memorial is a sidewalk attraction… and every other building has bars over the windows, the homes have bars over the windows, every house needs a fresh coat of paint, all the grass needs the attention of a lawn mower, the small businesses are all boarded up, and the only industry that seems to be alive at all is fast food.

These small observations — the lack of car dealerships, the models and years of the cars driving around us, the way every building looked like it could use a good scrubbing, how the only restaurants we could see had drive thrus — are what made Mississippi sad for me. And why what I learned in Mississippi was… I don’t know shit about the world.

The sun had already set by the time we crossed state lines from Georgia to Alabama and you could tell by the pavement on the interstate. We stopped for frozen yogurt in Birmingham. It was Saturday and the place was packed with mostly 20-somethings, but it lacked the jovial atmosphere you might associate with ice cream on a weekend night. Everyone seemed to know each other but no one was talking; instead, they were quietly sizing each other up from their respective tables. Driving away from Birmingham, Philip pointed out the skyline but it was too dark and there were too many trees for me to see much aside from a modest amount of light pollution. Lights lined the interstate on both sides when we reached Tuscaloosa, but only one set were turned on.

The photos above are pictures I took of damage done by the devastating tornado that tripped through Tuscaloosa in April of 2011 (the one everyone watched on YouTube). Nearly a year has passed and there are still huge expanses that have yet to see repairs. There’s a lot to say about Tuscaloosa — for a thick three weeks it was my home base. We returned each Sunday no matter where we’d found ourselves on Saturday night. But because I know people are curious about just how “awful” the south is and just to get it out of the way, here’s some Alabama grit served up with your grits:

• The Tuskegee syphilis experiment 
• Lurleen Wallace
• “The Machine” at the University of Alabama
• a concept called “voluntary segregation” (this link is just absurd, by the way)
• the extreme poverty
• Alabama’s new immigration laws
• the Southern Inferiority Complex
• really gross bugs (and stuff)

The only other thing that really saddened me about Alabama is that whenever I told anyone that I was visiting (willingly/on vacation/from Seattle) the reaction was some variation of, “Why on earth would you come here?” I’ve been fortunate enough to have done quite a bit of traveling thus far in my life and can say with confidence that I’ve never experienced that level of … I don’t even really know how to describe it. It was a lack of respect, pride, or appreciation for one’s own environment that I’ve never seen before. If there is one thing that would improve the South, that is it: ditch the inferiority complex.

Of course, there are many ways in which Tuscaloosa is a perfectly lovely city. It is home to the University of Alabama, which is huge and beautiful. It still manages to have a “down home”, small-town feel. The “downtown” and “Strip” (University-downtown) feed into one another but are gapped by less than half a mile. The houses are charming — ranging from sleepy bungalows to Victorian mansions to Southern giants. Tuscaloosa is known as “The Druid City” for all of its trees (namely Water Oak). I loved the trees! Going from a state known for its evergreen trees to a city known for its oak trees was fascinating. Even on gray days Tuscaloosa seemed brighter than Seattle, perhaps because it lacked a heavy green covering. Of course, most days weren’t gray. I’ve heard it was unseasonably warm while I was there (55-65 and sunny on most days) and if I loved Alabama for one reason, that would be it.

Also, and I think most Pacific Northwesterners will call me crazy for this, there is a  certain value to the flatness of that region. From my house north of Seattle, I can see two mountain ranges. Like, real live actual mountains: the Cascades to the east and the Olympics to the west. Tuscaloosa is flat, and so is most of the “heart of Dixie”. But something about that felt… lighter. I’ve always said, “I can’t live somewhere unless I can see the ocean on a daily basis.” But maybe the ocean has represented freedom to me because it’s been juxtaposed with overwhelming peaks that can make a person feel a little claustrophobic. In Tuscaloosa, flatness felt like opportunity.

Which is what it was! Located roughly 4 hours from pretty much anywhere else you could want to go, it was the ideal spot for a homebase.

Next time: Mississippi

Our first meal in Atlanta was at Yeah! Burger in the very sweet neighborhood known as Virginia-Highland. We ate massive burgers and tried fried pickles for the first time. Yeah! Burger specializes in locally sourced and organic meats assembled in custom ways using quality ingredients (so quality they were featured as Bon Appetit magazine’s #1 burger spot). The onion rings were divine; thin cut and fried to the perfect crispy bite. I also tried their tequila sunrise before my meal, and absolutely everything was delicious! After dinner we hopped over to Morelli’s Gourmet Ice Cream, where I sampled their salted caramel and cookie dough ice creams. (The salted caramel was exceptional, if not exceptionally rich, and the cookie dough was standard fare.) Finally, we checked in to our Sheraton hotel (booked through Hotwire) in downtown Atlanta, which was very lovely. Our room had a balcony which overlooked an indoor courtyard that housed the hotel’s pool and hot tub. Everything was very, very nice.

The next morning we decided to explore Lenox Square Mall, in the Buckhead district of Atlanta. Buckhead is this huge, extremely upscale part of Atlanta (home to many [all?] of the Real Housewives of Atlanta), where luxury cars and accessories rein supreme. We people-watched for awhile and then ate our Chick-Fil-A in sunshine with the best view Piedmont Park had to offer.

My main impressions of Atlanta were that it was a beautiful, huge city. Atlanta’s metro area has a population of something like 5 million people, and in addition to being the ninth most populated metro area… is just plain BIG. To give you better idea, Atlanta’s metro area is 8,376 square miles while San Francisco’s is only 3,524.   It is also stunning! The architecture is varied, the southern mansions are sprawling, and the city is kept very clean. I encountered some of the best dressed, nicest people on the entire trip in Atlanta. I can’t say it enough: I loved Atlanta! (But I might say it some more in Atlanta Pt 2

After meandering around Atlanta some more and ogling the southern homes by foot, we set our sights for Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and ventured into the heart of Dixie.

Next stop: Alabama!

Checking off bucket list items left & right!

Go out there and live life. It’s not waiting for you to grow a pair; you gotta go out there and seize it.

The reason Seng-ts’an is saying not to seek is because truth, or reality, is not something objective. Truth is not something “out there.” It is not something you will find as an object of perception or as a temporal experience. Reality is neither inside of you nor outside of you. Both “outside” and “inside” are not getting to the point. They both miss the mark because outside and inside are conceptual constructs with no inherent reality. They are simply abstract points of reference. Even words like “you,” or “me,” or “I,” are nothing more than conceptual points of reference existing only in the mind. Such concepts may have a practical value in daily life, but when assumed to be true they distort perception and create a virtual reality, or what in the East is called the world of samsara. 

Seng-ts’an was a wily old Zen master. He viewed things through the eye of enlightenment and was intimately aware of how the conditioned mind fools itself into false pursuits and blind alleys. He knew that seeking truth, or reality, is as silly as a dog thinking that it must chase its tail in order to attain its tail. The dog already has full possession of its tail from the very beginning. Besides, once the dog grasps his tail, he will have to let go of it in order to function. So even if you were to find the truth through grasping, you will have to let it go at some point in order to function. But even so, any truth that is attained through grasping is not the real truth because such a truth would be an object and therefore not real to begin with.

In order to seek, you must first have an idea, ideal, or an image, what it is you are seeking. That idea may not even be very conscious or clear but it must be there in order for you to seek. Being an idea it cannot be real. That’s why Seng-ts’an says “only cease to cherish opinions.” By opinions he means ideas, ideals, beliefs, and images, as well as personal opinions. This sounds easy but it is rarely as easy as it seems. Seng-ts’an is not saying you should never have a thought in your head, he is saying not to cherish the thoughts in your head. To cherish implies an emotional attachment and holding on to. When you cherish something, you place value on it because you think that it is real or because it defines who you think you are. This cherishing of thoughts and opinions is what the false self thrives on. It is what the false self is made of. When you realize that none of your ideas about truth are real, it is quite a shock to your system. It is an unexpected blow to the seeker and the seeking.

The task of any useful spiritual practice is therefore to dismantle cherishing the thoughts, opinions, and ideas that make up the false self, the self that is seeking. This is the true task of both meditation and inquiry. Through meditation we can come to see that the only thing that makes us suffer is our own mind. Sitting quietly reveals the mind to be nothing but conditioned thinking spontaneously arising within awareness. Through cherishing this thinking, through taking it to be real and relevant, we create internal images of self and others and the world. Then we live in these images as if they were real. To be caught within these images is to live in an illusory virtual reality. 

Through observing the illusory nature of thought without resisting it, we can begin to question and inquire into the underlying belief structures that support it. These belief structures are what form our emotional attachments to the false self and the world our minds create.

This is why I sometimes ask people, “Are you ready to lose your world?” Because true awakening will not fit into the world as you imagine it or the self you imagine yourself to be. Reality is not something that you integrate into your personal view of things. Reality is life without your distorting stories, ideas, and beliefs. It is perfect unity free of all reference points, with nowhere to stand and nothing to grab hold of. It has never been spoken, never been written, never been imagined. It is not hidden, but in plain view. Cease to cherish opinions and it stands before your very eyes. 

Adyashanti

I will be staying down in Dixie for a couple weeks. And since my personal frequently-asked-question lately has been “Why?” I thought I’d make a blog post about it.

So here’s why I’m making Tuscaloosa, Alabama, my home for the next few weeks:

• I decided to make 2012 “The Year of Yes” which means I want to have as many experiences and try as many new things as possible. And… this is a pretty new experience, that’s for sure!
• I’ve always been very fascinated with the south, but have never ventured further than North Carolina or Texas
• I’d really like to visit all 50 states, and… you know… there’s no time like the present to work on goals
• I am very fortunate to have a sincere and generous friend in Tuscaloosa with a spare bedroom and similar outlook on life
• It was time to leave my former job, and it seemed like a good idea to relax and have a little bit of fun in between jobs/life stages
• It’s about time for me to get reenrolled in school so I can (finally) finish up my BA and there are a ton of colleges to explore down here
• COME ON! It’s the dirty dirrrty south, why the hell not?

Bye, y’all!

At the time, I wrote lists the way junkies smoked crack. I was averaging one new planner a month. I was singlehandedly keeping Post-It in business. And I was exceedingly anxious, all. the. time. But I can’t remember actually living in that life. I don’t remember what it was like to wake up, roll out of bed, and feel crushed by the arbitrary weight of a to-do list in a planner.

It might seem depressing, but lately when I have been feeling low I focus on that fact: the fact that in even a week, I won’t remember the details of this evening. I’ll be feeling completely different, for completely different reasons.

And this is why I believe in reincarnation.

I mean, my belief in it is irrelevant… I’m pretty sure regardless of what we believe will happen after we die is irrelevant. Whatever is going to happen will happen without regard to our personal philosophies, but I’m not actually talking about postmortem reincarnation. And as much as I actually do believe in some sort of recycling of the soul, I’m not too concerned about whether or not it will actually happen. Because I’ve been reincarnated dozens of times in my short 21 years.

There was the time I was an infant. Or the time I saw green grass for the first time. There was the time when I fed goats as a toddler, or the time I went to my first real school. There was the little girl who did ballet and tap.The pre-pubescent in community theater. The girl in a school uniform. The seventh grader at my first dance. An American abroad. The high schooler, the licensed driver, the college girl. I’ve been a friend to people I don’t know anymore, to people who wouldn’t recognize me today. People I wouldn’t recognize today. A girl I wouldn’t recognize today.

I’m terribly unbothered with Twitter and the hashtag “ruining” the English language, because I’ve finally realized what it is that we try to accomplish with these sites, and why they will ultimately fail at accurately documenting our lives.

We put up albums titled “Summer of 2011″, we group our friends into groups headed “School friends”, “Coworkers”, we hashtag and tag and group and categorize and subcategorize to our little hearts content but ultimately, it is futile. Who determines when “Summer of 2011″ begins and ends? What about the individuals that are school friends, coworkers, and our best friends? What about the moments of our lives that are too painful or private to document publicly on our Facebook timelines? And even if Facebook and Twitter integrate the features necessary to subcategorize everything absolutely perfectly, what do the categorizing of our photos and friends really say about who we are, or who we’ve been?

I’ve simultaneously embraced and been petrified of the concept of reincarnation for awhile now. My ego is bruised imagining an existence of my soul where I wouldn’t know who Alexis Julian is, because I like her, I like her a lot. But the real rub is that she’s elusive. I’ve worn many hats in my life. I’ve played many roles, I’ve lead a myriad of very different “lives” all within this one. And even though these same eyes have opened every day of my 21 years, the same brain has thought, the same hands have touched… I don’t remember living and breathing each of those lives. Sometimes it feels as though the events of my life unfolded before a completely different person. And yet it was me all along.

So this one is for the girl who wrote the list titled “The woman I want to be” and the woman that would be. Here I am. A lot closer in many ways, lightyears away in others. But 100% myself all the same. Each day I peel back another layer, every moment I become a little more her, and a little different too. I’m not going to be afraid of “real” reincarnation, should that ever come. I’ve had a lot of practice.